Three fearless women who have risked their lives to stop illegal poaching rings and ruthless corporate interests that threaten to destroy precious ecosystems

Lance Richardson

04.07.16

Every twenty minutes, an entire species becomes extinct. Rhino poaching has increased 7,700 per cent since 2007 — last year was a record — and their horns are now more valuable than cocaine or gold.“When I was born, there were 22,000 elephants in Garamba National Park, and 500 rhinos,” said Kate Brooks, a conflict photojournalist and director ofThe Last Animals, at the Women in the World New York Summit on Thursday. “Today there are zero rhinos. There are 1300 elephants. And there are more militia than there are giraffe.”

Speaking with Katty Kay from BBC World News America, Brooks was joined by Dr. Paula Kahumbu, CEO of Kenya’s WildlifeDirect, and Mélanie Gouby, an investigative journalist whose work came to prominence through 2014’s Oscar-nominated documentaryVirunga, to discuss an escalating crisis currently engulfing the world’s animal populations.

In the 1980s, Kahumbu explained, a previous poaching epidemic was driven by the demand for ivory in Europe, Japan and the US. “Kenya and many African countries took the initiative of destroying ivory to send a world message that these animals are worth more alive,” she said. “That message translated into decisions that banned the international trade in ivory. The prices collapsed.”

Over time, however, the demand has returned — this time in China. “You can imagine a country where ivory is believed to be precious, to confer prestige on the owners of it,” Kahumbu continued. Elsewhere, in Vietnam, rhino horn are being used in medicinal remedies believed (inaccurately) to cure headaches and cancer. “This just resulted in an epidemic of poaching across the entire continent,” Kahumbu said, “and this is fueled by corruption in Africa.”

Brooks has witnessed this epidemic up close, and describes the frontline as comparable to any war she has covered, which includes Afghanistan after 9/11. In Garamba, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Lord’s Resistance Army and various rebel factions plunder the natural resources to fund terrorism activities. “You also have multiple military helicopter incursions into the park whereby elephants are machine-gunned down,” Brooks said, before pointing out the human cost that also goes along with this: Over 1,000 park rangers have been killed in the last ten years for trying to protect the animals.

Seized tiger heads at the National Wildlife Property Repository.

(Courtesy of Kate Brooks)

Zakouma National park was, until 2008, a dry season concentration area for one of the largest elephant populations in the central African region. However massive poaching caused the elephant population to plummet from approximately 3,9000 animals in 2005 to just 450 in 2010. Since African Parks assumed management of Zakouma in late 2010, an intensive anti-poaching program me has been implemented. As a result elephant numbers have stabilized and elephant calves have been observed for the first time in many years.

(Courtesy of Kate Brooks)

Elephants at Garamba National Park are on the front lines of the ivory wars; they face the Lord’s Resistance Army, Sudanese rebel factions including the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army and have even been machine gunned down in attacks carried out by helicopter.

(Courtesy of Kate Brooks)

On May 2015 Singapore intercepted two 20 foot cargo containers containing 4.6 tons of ivory being shipped from Mombassa, Kenya to Vietnam, the estimated value on the black market is an estimated 8 million USD. The contraband was hidden in tea leaves and also contained rhino horn and hyena teeth.

(Courtesy of Kate Brooks)

In 2011 and 2012, elephants were killed for their ivory in record numbers.The International Fund for Animal Welfare, which published a study into the illegal wildlife trade in June 2013, calculated that an elephant dies to poaching every 15 minutes. Some elephants are shot, while others are poisoned with arrows or pieces of metal. This one was poisoned.

(Courtesy of Kate Brooks)

Gouby argued that poverty in Africa is also a serious part of the problem, pointing to the poaching of pangolins in a national park in Cameroon. “On the border there is a town where everyone is linked to poaching. Everyone survives thanks to poaching” she said. “There is nothing else, and people don’t have an alternative.”

“Do you think poverty is an excuse for poaching?” asked Katty Kay.

“If you don’t have food to put on your table at night for your children, I don’t think anything else matters,” Gouby said, shaking her head. “That’s the way it is. People are desperately poor in a lot of these places.”

But Gouby also showed that things are far from hopeless when it comes to change. In Virunga, her filmed exposé of the illegal activities of Soco International, a British oil company, blind corporate interests threatened a national park home to many of the world’s last 900 mountain gorillas. After Virunga was released, Soco denied allegations of bribery and coercion laid out in the documentary. “But a number of their shareholders didn’t think that was enough,” Gouby explained. “They were very shocked by what the film showed.” Some shareholders divested from the company, and Soco eventually halted its oil exploration of the park. “The company didn’t renew its license,” Gouby said, to thunderous applause.

French investigative journalist Melanie Gouby is one of the four people portrayed in the Oscar-nominated documentary “Virunga.”

(Brent Stirton)

Dr. Paula Kahumbu, CEO, Wildlife Direct

(Courtesy of Paula Kahumbu)

Kate Brooks, Director, “The Last Animals.”

(Courtesy Kate Brooks)

There are other success stories, other reasons to hope. Not long ago, many Kenyans cared very little about the fate of their wildlife; last week, however, a lion killing in Nairobi caused local outrage: “Public opinion can change,” said Kahumbu, who attributes some of this shift to a television series promoting Kenyan wildlife to Kenyans. At the end of this month, Kenya will also destroy 106 tons of ivory and rhino horn—more than a billion dollar’s worth—to make a new statement to the world that poaching is unacceptable.

And it is the world’s problem. Towards the end of the discussion, Brooks showed a shocking photograph: shelves lined with tiger and leopard heads. The photograph was taken not in Africa, or China, but at the National Eagle and Wildlife Property Repository in Denver, Colorado, a 16,000-square-foot facility containing more than 1.5 million specimens seized by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. “The reality is that the US is the second largest consumer of wildlife products after China,” Brooks said. The issue is closer to home than many people realize.

“The only way to deal with this crisis is a global response,” said Kahumbu.